By Molly Moore and John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 3, 2008
PARIS, Jan. 2 -- In bars and cafes across Paris, in restaurants and casinos throughout France, the once-revered cigarette now is officially banned, relegating one of the Western world's last public smoking holdouts to the ashtray of history.
On Wednesday, the public act that perhaps most epitomized the French as sexy, debonair, sultry, brooding -- and perhaps more than a little susceptible to cancer -- was snuffed out by the government.
In a single day, Parisian dining establishments and watering holes acquired an entirely new atmosphere.
Davy Kazan took a deep breath and glanced incredulously around the boisterous dining room of the Vaudeville brasserie, which is usually blanketed with smoke by mid-evening.
"You can actually smell the food!" declared Kazan, 39, a Munich resident who is on a New Year's vacation in Paris.
He said he's also excited about returning home to visit his favorite sports bar, which became smoke-free Wednesday under tighter smoking restrictions imposed in many German cities and regions.
But Romain Lefevre, a 41-year-old real estate broker, was fuming in the now-smokeless bar of Le Beaujolais Cafe a block from the Eiffel Tower.
"Not smoking during dinner is not a problem, but after eating -- yes, I would like a cigarette with my coffee," said Lefevre, a pack-a-day smoker for 20 years.
In the end, the inconvenience, discomfort and impracticality of smoking in sometimes freezing outdoor air might force him to quit, he said. "And people suffer from cigarette cancer," he noted. "And it costs too much, so is it a good idea to ban smoking?" He shrugged. "Perhaps."
The ban came as no surprise. After intense lobbying, eating and drinking establishments were granted an 11-month stay of execution from a law that was imposed on all other public facilities last year.
The government even offered a final New Year's concession: It delayed imposition of the law from Jan. 1 until Wednesday to allow smokers a final night of indulging indoors.
"Our objective isn't to annoy people but to protect them," French Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin said in an interview published this week in the newspaper Le Parisien. "We shouldn't forget that every year 66,000 deaths are caused by smoking and 5,000 by secondhand smoke."
Breaking the law won't be cheap. Fines will run between the equivalent of about $100 and $660. Businesses caught allowing puffers can get hit with fines of more than $1,000.
On Wednesday, Bachelot-Narquin charged into the Wepler brasserie, a century-old Paris institution, to check out the status of the ban she is charged with enforcing.
Not a smoker was in sight.
"This is a new art of life supported by more than 80 percent of our citizens," she observed.
Polls have shown overwhelming public support for smoking bans in public places in the face of heightened concern over health and irritation with the smell.
Under pressure from the European Union, European countries slowly have shoved smokers out of more public spaces in recent years, though laws are enforced unevenly in many countries.
Ireland was the first to impose a comprehensive ban on puffing in public places, in March 2004. Norway, Britain, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Lithuania followed with various prohibitions. Italy has outlawed smoking in the workplace, and Naples and Verona have barred smoking in parks.
Portugal also joined the anti-smoke world Wednesday. Turkey's parliament began debating a proposal to prohibit smoking in restaurants and other public areas.
An estimated 20 percent of the French population smokes, a figure that has declined in recent years, according to health officials.
Altadis, the manufacturer of the potent Gauloises and Gitanes cigarettes -- the smokes favored by the likes of actress Brigitte Bardot, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and generations of French laborers -- shut down its French factory two years ago and moved its assembly line for the distinctive blue Gauloises packs, with the trademark helmet of a Gallic warrior, to Spain, where labor is cheaper and smokers more plentiful.
Michelle Veillard, 60, who, with her husband, owns the 38 Eiffel Brasserie near the Eiffel Tower, supports France's ban. "We have lots of customers who smoke, but we haven't had any problems," she said. "If they want to smoke, they can go outside."
Veillard said that when she and her husband dine out, they always sit in a nonsmoking section, and they are happy to see smoking end in their own establishment.
"When my husband came home from work -- whew! His clothes stank!" Veillard said. "We prefer the ban."
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